What impacts? The must-read report warns that “we’re on track for a 4°C warmer world marked by extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.”

Now World Bank President Jim Yong Kim has a strong WashPost op-ed that warns “we need to get serious fast” to avoid the looming “climate catastrophe.” He explains:

The signs of global warming are becoming more obvious and more frequent. A glut of extreme weather conditions is appearing globally. And the average temperature in the United States last year was the highest ever recorded….

If there is no action soon, the future will become bleak. The World Bank Group released a reportin November that concluded that the world could warm by 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) by the end of this century if concerted action is not taken now.

A world that warm means seas would rise 1.5 to 3 feet, putting at risk hundreds of millions of city dwellers globally. It would mean that storms once dubbed “once in a century” would become common, perhaps occurring every year. And it would mean that much of the United States, from Los Angeles to Kansas to the nation’s capital, would feel like an unbearable oven in the summer.

What does the physician and anthropologist recommend we do?

The world’s top priority must be to get finance flowing and get prices right on all aspects of energy costs to support low-carbon growth. Achieving a predictable price on carbon that accurately reflects real environmental costs is key to delivering emission reductions at scale. Correct energy pricing can also provide incentives for investments in energy efficiency and cleaner energy technologies.

A second immediate step is to end harmful fuel subsidies globally, which could lead to a 5 percent fall in emissions by 2020. Countries spend more than $500 billion annually in fossil-fuel subsidies and an additional $500 billion in other subsidies, often related to agriculture and water, that are, ultimately, environmentally harmful. That trillion dollars could be put to better use for the jobs of the future, social safety nets or vaccines.

Kim certainly talks to the talk when it comes to the implications of the climate crisis for the Bank itself:

Just as the Bretton Woods institutions were created to prevent a third world war, the world needs a bold global approach to help avoid the climate catastrophe it faces today. The World Bank Group is ready to work with others to meet this challenge. With every investment we make and every action we take, we should have in mind the threat of an even warmer world and the opportunity of inclusive green growth.

On the basis of the report and this new op-ed, the bank must stop funding new fossil fuel plants. I use the word “must” because that is the word the report and President Kim repeatedly use.

And it must be “all new fossil fuel plants” because the International Energy Agency has made clear this year with detailed analysis that natural gas isn’t the solution if your goal is staying far from 7°F warming — see IEA’s “Golden Age of Gas Scenario” Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate Change. It must be noted that even that IEA gas scenario, which results in too much warning, assumes that not only does global oil consumption peak around 2020 — but so does coal! So if one or both of those peaks don’t happen — and they wouldn’t without a high price of carbon and aggressively clean energy deployment starting now — then the Golden Age of Gas is just Hell and High Water, the “devastating” scenario laid out in the World Bank report.

It’s a myth that conservative ideology has anything to do with it. Those who block clean energy value money above all, and don’t care about the consequences. That is the sickness that we have to defeat.

Neither the medical profession nor the climate profession focus on addressing ’causes'; rather they address ‘symptoms’, and express amazement why the problem never gets solved. The ’cause’ of the climate change problem is the addiction of the energy consumer to an energy intensive way of life enabled by cheap fossil fuels. There are many who exploit this addiction, like the deniers and the fossil energy organizations, but they are not the central cause. The politicians do nothing because they do not want to offend their constituency, the prolific energy consumer. Until this central cause is addressed, there will be zero progress, as we have been observing for forty years.

‘Conservative’ is a mendacious euphemism for the pathologically greedy and psychologically malignant who capitalism places in charge of societies because of their ability to control affairs through their money power.

Stephen – it’s good to see this question asked. The scale and imminence of the threat, compared with the time needed even for the best case mitigation strategy to take effect, implies that major powers see some overiding priority for inaction on climate.

In America’s case, the debate on action is itself futile, since it is over whether the Cancun pledge of a mere 3.67% cut by 2020 off the 1990 UNFCCC baseline will be honoured. The fact that most progressive media hype this pledge as 17% off Bush’s unilateral 2005 baseline indicates a sad poverty of ambition to my mind.

The standard excuses for four years inaction under a democrat president are no longer plausible. “Election-funding-corruption” doesn’t apply to a second term president and the urgency should anyway have the establishment demanding action; being “too busy” is a matter of policy priority; and “too much opposition” is implausible with 80% polling for action – as well as with the sudden prioretizing of gun control above climate despite 50% implacable opposition.

So what priorities are there that can divert the WH from addressing the existential climate threat, and that prevent the vast majority of US corporations (who are all in the climate firing line and who mostly lack any inherent loyalty to FFs) from demanding action and funding publicity and a media focus on slamming the circus of denial ?

It was Cheyney & Bush who ended constructive US participation in UN negotiations and launched the unstated policy of a ‘brinkmanship of inaction’ with China, and Obama has not replaced that policy.

Logically the one paramount bipartisan priority driving the persistent inaction is thus China’s rise threatening US global economic dominance – which would be ended if climate impacts are allowed to advance to the point of crop failures and food shortages causing civil unrest to destabilize China’s government.

According to a recent UK report that addresses the near-term prospects of such shortages : “Food Security: Near future projections of the impact of drought in Asia” (available online at http://www.lowcarbonfutures.org ) China is now liable to face such crop failures within ten to fifteen years. With the ongoing destabilization of the Jetstream, this may be a rather conservative estimate.

If you can see any other US priority of a magnitude to overide action on the climate threat I wish you’d post it, as it seems to me that until there is clear understanding of what the obstruction is and where it is vulnerable, worldwide efforts to resolve it will remain simply ineffective.

The US could have crop failures that are just as destabilizing as any might be in China. And soon, if the Arctic ice cap goes and the jet stream comes unhinged.

Think of the jet stream’s behavior in March 2012, when nighttime temps in northern states broke all-time record highs for the entire month. Or Hurricane Sandy, abruptly deflected dead west by a rogue lobe. Now imagine this phenomenon happening during the height of the growing season–July, August, ans September rains shifting all over the place; continental-scale droughts and floods just when steady,predictable rain is most needed. Throw in some crazy new paths for hurricanes, some derechos, and a 40% crop failure a la Russian wheat in 2010 seems like the low end.

Plus, there’d be instability in electric generation brought on by this errant weather. The economy would take a huge hit.

Now throw in the 300 million guns in this country. It’s a bad recipe.

The only real hope is some quickly coalescing realization among key nations that this is in fact the likely scenario and must be avoided, the same way the same major powers agree not to nuke one another, because there can be no winners. Hoping that climate change hurts China first and worse is a very poorly thought-out strategy.

I can’t really imagine anyone in our government can persuade enough of his/her fellows that this is a seriously considered approach. It’s some kind of Dr. Strangelove scenario.

Change – I’d agree that the US is getting increasingly hammered by extreme events – Munich Re data shows them have been rising much faster than in any comparable area. But back in 2000 when Cheyney imposed the policy of inaction, the received wisdom was that developing nations, such as China, would be hit much harder than developed nations like the US, and that the wealthy US would be far better able to afford the damages and rebuilding costs and food price rises. Those grossly flawed assumptions of relative advantage are two of the policy’s major weaknesses – it is proving economically unsustainable and thus actually counterproductive to its objective of securing US global economic dominance.

Cheyney was a cold war warrior – when he became Bush senior’s defense secretary he’d seen four decades of the effort to deny the USSR’s bid for global dominance by means of mounting the nuclear arms race with its vast costs, myriad proxy-wars and existential risks – all of which were seen as fully justified to maintain US dominance.

Given his background and the visible economic rise of China by 2000, it is notable that no other policy was launched to deflect China’s bid for dominance than the Brinkmanship of Inaction – though we can be certain that the maintenance of US dominance remained Washington’s paramount priority.

Your remark that the policy has a Stranglovian ring to it is strangely accurate – Peter Seller’s portrayal of Dr Strangelove was a composite of caricatures of two people – Werner Von Braun (a captured Nazi rocket scientist who led the US ICBM program) and one Edward Teller (aka “father of the H-bomb”, a fervent anti-communist scientist). When the USSR collapsed Teller’s stock in Washington was sky high – and he and Cheyney would certainly have known each other. In ’95 he wrote a seminal paper on sulphate aerosol geo-engineering, arguing that, should it become necessary, an ‘off-switch’ for global warming was easily available. This was critical to the launch of the policy of a Brinkmanship of Inaction against communist China in providing the necessary exit-strategy, without which the policy could not have been adopted.

Thus Strangelovian is about right. The fact that the policy is also deeply incompetent, as well as genocidally immoral, means that it is increasingly vulnerable to being exposed, condemned and overturned.

John, re the pseudo-Green enviro-angst corporations (aka ENGOs ?):
“Haven’t we been paying their freight for 4 decades with little else to show.”
I’d say bugger-all to show for it would be nearer the mark.

About fifteen years ago I went to a public meeting where a panel with reps of FOE, WFN & Greenpeace talked up their tremendous enviro-protection performances. During questions I stood up and very politely pointed out that as far as I cold see we were worse off by an order of magnitude than we’d been 25 years earlier.

This got several expressions of agreement from the audience, and the panel were plainly bloody furious and blustered a pathetic defence.

You may have seen reports that here in the UK a top-rank police consortium spent about £20m between 2000 and 2010 infiltrating numerous long-term agents into the activist wing of the climate campaign – even to the extent of providing the transport for some actions.

If funds on that scale are spent on pretty ineffective small campaign groups, then logically how much is it worth to the UK establishment to fund agents of influence on the policies of the major ENGOs, with their millions of middle class subscribers ? And how much in the US ?

I’m sitting on a good transit design containing about 100 separate innovations. No one in H—, er, on planet Eaarth is interested in deploying the transit system or any of its subsystems. Don’t deploy, don’t deploy, don’t deploy, Research because research brings in funding but don’t develop, don’t deploy, don’t deploy, don’t deploy.

To put it quite succinctly, in this fossil fuel civilization, the world’s richest and largest industries — valued in many trillions of dollars in annual subsidies, revenues, and infrastructure — feed in the trough of transportation systems based on cars while the basic technology has existed for many years capable of providing carbon free transit and mobility solutions accessible to everyone at minimal human and environmental costs.

And, an even more succinct action statement is that we have to move from a fossil fuel civilization to a carbon free civilization.

The overriding system is civilization where people live and work together and stuff like this is done all the time.

In a major bank for example, it often becomes necessary to move from one huge books-of-the-bank data processing system to another. Yes, this is a major effort and can even encompass trillions of dollars in equities, etc, but this happens with the intent that the bank will function better than ever . . .

The migration in our case is that civilization must learn to migrate from a dependency on fossil fuels to one that more directly relies on natural systems and human capital.

“before the switch to wind power, the C-Train’s energy supply accounted for about 20,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases and other forms of air pollution every year, less than 1/10 of the pollution that would have resulted if all C-Train passengers had driven in their own cars. Under the Ride the Wind program, these emissions have been reduced to practically zero.”

Even if wind or other clean energy was not used to build and maintain the equipment and infrastructure it’s still great to learn of a system that gets its energy from wind.

One fantasy is a really light elevated rail and vehicle system that automatically adjusts to wind direction allowing featherweight vehicles to sail this country’s Great Plains and other wide open spaces at terrific speeds.

That’s the beauty of these Trojans, like Kim and Obama. They look good, they mouth the platitudes, they stroke the egos and then they do their Masters’ bidding, and the poor ‘Hope Fiends’ wonder, yet again, just what in blazes is going on?

I’m sorry to say that the climate change issue may lead down the same path for us as slavery did. In fact, I think that fear is THE big driver of inaction from those who know what’s going on, like Mr. Obama. Too many guns, too much romance about “liberty” and individualism.

You can see the visceral hate that Obamacare provoked. We got a whole new political party in reaction. Obamacare was simply putting healthcare closer to a public utility model. Imagine the reaction of the reactionaries once (or rather, if) we start making the changes that would actually start to bend the CO2 accumulation curve.

It may well rhyme with 1861. I hope the public consensus develops strongly enough soon enough to avoid that.

Mike Roddy, we are a capitve audience of CP and the time has come to open the tent.

We have a right, as contributors, to demand results for our many millions of dollars of contributions to the big green. They are insular, conservative and refuse to say the words ‘approaching our extinction’.

Are they bought in, locked in or shut in by the funders? All of the above, I believe. High salaries, overhead and travel budgets. Could change, if they wake up to the responsibilities we have invested in them.

Damn, time to call them out by name and affiliation.

If the big green cannot give us, very quickly, a road map to our and our children’s survival then it is time to find a new wave. And, I despair what is the option.

You’re right, John, and the big green NGO’s are not going to change from within. Some, like EDF and NRDC, are hopeless, but pressure on the Sierra Club and RAN could bring them back to their roots. Both organizations are headquartered in San Francisco, where I am visiting this week. If we can’t change them here, it’s an impossible task, and we will need new, more nimble organizations to replace them.

John, You’re looking for an exogenous solution to a problem that requires an endogenous solution. Suppose 98% of the electorate were alcoholics, and they faced extinction in a few decades if they continued their profligate ways. Would you expect a solution from government; anyone who proposed a clampdown would be voted out of office the next day? Would you blame the alcohol producers and distributors? You probably would, but they are not the central cause. We are the problem, and until we give up our profligate energy consuming ways voluntarily or involuntarily, no action will take place. The cause is quite simple, but we look for complex solutions externally. They haven’t worked and never will work, because they don’t address the central cause.

In minimizing the efforts of environmental groups, you are ignoring things like the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, which, together with partner organizations, has been responsible for shutting coal plants and preventing others from being opened.

I recently talked with a frequently-quoted meteorologist who said, summarizing, “We’re (fried)” ( or another f word that he couldn’t say on the air). I hope we can prove him wrong, but time is running out.

However, we face a balancing act between despair and optimism. Yes, we are stuck with the global warming we have now, or worse. But there are still things we can do to keep it from getting worse.

Environmental groups also must deal with this balancing act…advocating for as much reduction in GHG emissions as fast as we can get it, without driving people into such despair that they will do nothing.

“With every investment we make and every action we take, we should have in mind the threat of an even warmer world and the opportunity of inclusive green growth”

“Having in mind” is a very weak statement that does not connect to action.

As long as action is measured as a percent of positive change in the right direction we will are doomed to failure. When will we start measuring our actions against the goal we all recognize and know must be achieved – Zero GHG emissions.

If Mr. Kim indicated that the world bank would no longer invest in projects that generated green house gases (zero emissions), that would be something. That would be progress.

Rampant “free market” capitalism is at the heart of the problem of climate inaction.
Corporate entities insist on ‘business as usual’ to keep the profits rolling in, regardless of future consequences. The real costs of future climate related disasters will be socialised through ‘government finances’, providing no relative financial disadvantage imposed on carbon polluting industries that are causing the problem, so there is no incentive for them to change course.
Until the CO2 emissions of their product appear as a liability on corporate balance sheets, the great and clever minds of commerce will not address the reduction of CO2 pollution.
Nature, on the other hand will inexorably respond as predicted by science, ensuring no-one will win if we continue on our present course.
Living costs must rise; stability through insurance will be prohibitive for many.
The fossil fuel industry must come out of denial and accept that they will never be able to fully exploit their reserves of oil and gas.
The canny and clever ones who move first (before the share market prices the true value of untapped reserves are factored into corporate worth), will likely ensure their dominance of market share in the renewable energy industry, but those who change over late will be left holding relatively worthless assets.
Perhaps the catalyst for corporate change will be shareholder uncertainty, generated by natural disasters and catastrophes’ that are exacerbated by climate change.
Propaganda can misrepresent and confuse the public understanding of the science, but a continuance of nature’s onslaught speaks loudly and indelibly for itself.

Absolutely. Capitalism is innately anti-human and anti-life, a neoplastic system that, like cancer, must grow and grow (if only to repay debt and feed the parasite elite’s lust for a ten percent return on capital per annum) until till it inevitably kills its host, humanity, which is the end-stage that we have reached. It turns everything, human labour and effort, natural resources and the very fabric of the biosphere, into the dead stuff of capital, then, rather than using that wealth to raise humanity up and out of poverty and want, it accumulates it in ever greater amounts in as few hands as possible. Talk of ‘reforming’ capitalism is akin to speaking of ‘user-friendly’ cancer.

Kind of under the impression that under Stalin and Mao tens of millions died and suffered needlessly . . .

and, well then there was Genghis Khan . . .

As Daniel Kahneman (“Thinking Fast and Slow”) describes the vast array of beliefs in causality as not being terribly rational; as there’s a huge amount of chaos and luck involved in how reality unfolds.

In any case, the root of our problem is indeed manmade in systems of technologies that no longer serve us well; and the simple answer is that we must move on.

Neither Stalin nor Mao were communists as conceptualized by Marx. They, together with Genghis Khan, employed the same first design principle of top down authority as capitalism has adopted, with the same results. This principle needs changing urgently, ME

I’m rather disappointed that my comment re the truth about Mao has gone. As long as the propaganda is peddled that Mao was an unregenerate monster who did no good, and that the current Chinese government is somehow illegitimate, tainted by Mao, then we are heading, not for needed global co-operation, but a gigantic and destructive confrontation and war. Who wants that?

Anyone who wants to take action today can do so, easily. I am offsetting carbon emissions from drivers by living a 100% bicycle lifestyle. I’m encouraged by the support I have received as I make it possible to raise the price of carbon by voluntarily donations. The proceeds are used to provide transportation fuel (i.e. food), maintain my bike, and provide personal climate control (i.e. clothing). Anyone aching for action to be taken today can join me by offsetting their carbon.

Since there seems to be considerable consensus that we are heading into a period of climate chaos and perhaps a period of strong social cohesion — not assured — to combat and survive the chaos and necessarily NOT so bad a future after all.

If you truly grasp the scale of this thing; who knows? If we’re able to beat this thing, we’ll be ready for the stars?

You state: “If we’re able to beat this thing”. This is akin to the language used in the war on cancer, and other such ‘wars’. That’s why cancer is still a scourge, and it’s the same reason climate change is still a scourge. Much cancer (not all; there are geneitic components) comes from toxic exposures and a toxic lifestyle (junk food, junk drink, junk fats, etc). These are personal choices, and much cancer could be eliminated by living a stricter lifestyle. We choose not to do this. Same as climate change. There’s no war here; we like the luxurious lifestyle that high energy use enabled by cheap fossil fuels brings. Stop blaming the energy companies, the government, the World Bank, the deniers. They may be exploiters of our addictions, but the central cause is our addiction, not their exploitation.

Of course, the ramp up to effective action levels is still nowhere to be found which would likely entail research, development and rapid deployment of large scale net zero transit systems providing a critical path to an equally rapid transition to a carbon free civilization.

“We want to do everything we can to lower the use of coal. But we can’t turn our backs when poor countries need coal,” to lift their economies and provide heat for their populations.”

This is the crux of the problem, isn’t it? Developed countries have taken advantage of cheap fossil fuels for the past 150 years to amass enormous wealth. Now developing countries want to do the same, but we’re telling them they need to take a different, significantly more expensive (at least in up front costs) and relatively untested path. One option is for developed countries to massively reduce our own emissions so that developing countries can be allowed to see their emissions grow in the near term, while the world still stays under a 2 degree carbon budget in aggregate. But the developed world isn’t going to do that, so instead a poor developing country with very low per capita emissions getting a coal plant becomes the villain. Now there’s a legitimate debate to be had about how poor is poor and whether China should be treated like India or South African should be treated like Mongolia, but I do think that in these quotes above, Jim Yong Kim is getting at the heart of the equity debate that is making ambitious collective effort at the international level so elusive. I’m not sure a blanket rule of no more fossil fuel plants is very helpful until you’re also able to find the spare financial resources that make a cleaner alternative affordable for the poorest.

And by far the best response to the fact that the world’s extreme poor require energy to escape their poverty trap would be for the developed world to provide huge amounts of clean energy to the poor eliminating the need for coal.

What should be quite evident from this is that fossil fuels are actually very expensive when taken over any reasonable time span of ten to twenty years; probably much shorter periods of five years or less.

We are wasting literally tens of trillions of dollars not making the immediate transition to an eco-friendly and most importantly a people-friendly civilization.